Summertime on Jean Lake.
Posted: April 28th, 2007, 9:25 pm
(revisited)
Summer on Jean Lake. Pack your swim trunks. Except Jean Lake is a white hot flat of cracked clay and it's a hundred-fourteen in the shade. From the next ridge, past wavering powerline towers, is a serene view of the state prison, which dovetails nicely. "I like things that are fucked up", Ned explained as we drove the Rio and photographed ruined stations one time. Ned has a bunker in El Paso where he paints in a jagged stream like fine ragged smoke. Plenty of ruins lay about... exhausted mineral veins, snake holes, chucked artifacts and rats by night. Spent mines dot burnt ridges in a dry scour dementia similar to that of their finders... Eden Mine, Ben Hur Mine, Queen of the West Mine, Hooligan Mine, Wandering Boy Mine, Total Wreck Mine, Liberty Pit, Sphinx Glory Hole... they leave markers.
Now comes the heat. I counted on wind scrape in this free for all, but wind is a trickle. So I put the truck at right angles to it, ninety degrees to a hundred-fourteen; windows open and water jug too hot to taste as I imagined. Except I imagined slow motion consciousness, slower than dust devil after dust devil that can't wobble up the side of a ramp, and I never figured a subtle phase shift toward pure liquid. But there is space enough to consider origins, if not breath. One might not make the horizon on foot. I like things that are fucked up, like a summer picnic on the shore of Jean Lake in July. I could find things equally fucked up in several northern Detroits, though I'd be deprived of sunlight.
On the way down, Augustus Pablo screamed at me out of nowhere, out of the sand; that is, if minor key melodica may scream from a dashboard... the far east sound, far east of far west. I can't get much farther from ever-gray steel. Praise be to a sun waste wonderland that won't stand still, laid out in molten salt and whiskey echo... whh whh wha whaa whaa whaa whaa whaaap whaaap... synapse snap... Heat is better left to quiet.
But I've left off some details. From p. 649: "Red-tailed hawk:... In flight they soar in a slight dihedral, flapping as little as possible to conserve energy. They hover on beating wings or 'kite' by soaring into the wind. They live in open country with high perches, and build a stick nest in a large tree, or cactus, or on a cliff more than a hundred feet above the ground"... Not that any living thing would subject itself to this high noon beat down. Maybe the pupfish. They still twitch a few ridges west in shrinking hundred-thirteen degree pools of brack below a fissured volcanic wasteland. Pupfish weather. From p. 429: "... length two or three inches. Females and non-breeding males are tan, and breeding males are irridescent blue and defend their territory aggressively in the spring/summer breeding period."... What is the point of sex here? I've seen this place from several ridges and it is foreign and patient and dead, I assure you. Sun waste refuge.
In the customary pall of late spring in my native North, I imagined a pointless desert road in the kind of heat that demands submission. But temporary discomfort is nothing compared to choreographed indeterminacy spreading out, and the lower passes can't stand still. I grab a bottle from the cooler and scrawl in a notebook that sticks to my arm. But now is no time for whiskey, not in this heat, except if it opens another window. Reference points bounce on barmy slopes and insure their terrible greatness and I never quite know where I stand, though I have blurred space and time sufficient to ask the question.
Summer on Jean Lake. Pack your swim trunks. Except Jean Lake is a white hot flat of cracked clay and it's a hundred-fourteen in the shade. From the next ridge, past wavering powerline towers, is a serene view of the state prison, which dovetails nicely. "I like things that are fucked up", Ned explained as we drove the Rio and photographed ruined stations one time. Ned has a bunker in El Paso where he paints in a jagged stream like fine ragged smoke. Plenty of ruins lay about... exhausted mineral veins, snake holes, chucked artifacts and rats by night. Spent mines dot burnt ridges in a dry scour dementia similar to that of their finders... Eden Mine, Ben Hur Mine, Queen of the West Mine, Hooligan Mine, Wandering Boy Mine, Total Wreck Mine, Liberty Pit, Sphinx Glory Hole... they leave markers.
Now comes the heat. I counted on wind scrape in this free for all, but wind is a trickle. So I put the truck at right angles to it, ninety degrees to a hundred-fourteen; windows open and water jug too hot to taste as I imagined. Except I imagined slow motion consciousness, slower than dust devil after dust devil that can't wobble up the side of a ramp, and I never figured a subtle phase shift toward pure liquid. But there is space enough to consider origins, if not breath. One might not make the horizon on foot. I like things that are fucked up, like a summer picnic on the shore of Jean Lake in July. I could find things equally fucked up in several northern Detroits, though I'd be deprived of sunlight.
On the way down, Augustus Pablo screamed at me out of nowhere, out of the sand; that is, if minor key melodica may scream from a dashboard... the far east sound, far east of far west. I can't get much farther from ever-gray steel. Praise be to a sun waste wonderland that won't stand still, laid out in molten salt and whiskey echo... whh whh wha whaa whaa whaa whaa whaaap whaaap... synapse snap... Heat is better left to quiet.
But I've left off some details. From p. 649: "Red-tailed hawk:... In flight they soar in a slight dihedral, flapping as little as possible to conserve energy. They hover on beating wings or 'kite' by soaring into the wind. They live in open country with high perches, and build a stick nest in a large tree, or cactus, or on a cliff more than a hundred feet above the ground"... Not that any living thing would subject itself to this high noon beat down. Maybe the pupfish. They still twitch a few ridges west in shrinking hundred-thirteen degree pools of brack below a fissured volcanic wasteland. Pupfish weather. From p. 429: "... length two or three inches. Females and non-breeding males are tan, and breeding males are irridescent blue and defend their territory aggressively in the spring/summer breeding period."... What is the point of sex here? I've seen this place from several ridges and it is foreign and patient and dead, I assure you. Sun waste refuge.
In the customary pall of late spring in my native North, I imagined a pointless desert road in the kind of heat that demands submission. But temporary discomfort is nothing compared to choreographed indeterminacy spreading out, and the lower passes can't stand still. I grab a bottle from the cooler and scrawl in a notebook that sticks to my arm. But now is no time for whiskey, not in this heat, except if it opens another window. Reference points bounce on barmy slopes and insure their terrible greatness and I never quite know where I stand, though I have blurred space and time sufficient to ask the question.
